Drop Dice

For most regular gaming groups, the social contract is an unspoken thing. You come to understand it through time and playing with the same people. Occasionally, doing a social contract can yield very beneficial results. Take for example my group. We've been playing together for 4 years, and I can't say that beyond the first times we played together, that we have actually sat down and discussed a social contract.  This unfortunately has led to misunderstandings in games, and misunderstanding from both the GM and the players. This week I did not run Star Wars. Instead I discussed a social contract, for the upcoming Savage Worlds game. This discussion actually helped our communication, through the other 3 games, that we play. Since we generally have the same expectations, it helped to reiterate this this, as we have had some problems with attendance. Or more importantly alerting the group, as to when you would be missing a game. This led me to the idea that, all social contracts, should have an underlying format, that is universally true.

• Attendance Policy - to include expectation by the GM, for when games will be held ,and players for how they will alert someone, that they will be missing. My group uses Google Hangouts, and a community for our games making it easier to keep everything together, plus with smart phones its easy to let people know if your going to be late to the game.
• Code of Conduct - This usually as simple as be respectful of the other people at the game, but what does that mean to each person? You may find out that what one person thinks of as fine is not with another.
• Expectations - This one breaks down a couple ways. Expectations of the GM for the GM, GM for the game, GM for the Players, Players for GM, Players for the game, and Players for Players. This is probably the best part about discussing the social contract and the very reason its good to revisit the contract with every new game. Another thing to talk about is the pre-game and post game expectations. For example in a game like Pathfinder with levels, we have the rule that if you gain a level you must apply it to the sheet before coming to the table and send a copy to the GM before the day of the next game or else your level gets held until next week.
• If its a different session from your Campaign Framework revisit - this is a great time to revisit it, like I said our social contract discussion kind of turned into a three campaign discuss and we revisited every game's Campaign Framework even if we were already well into the other games.